It's best to focus on what you know best: headbands. So, articles might include: The right headband for your personality, How headbands can complete your look, Runway headbands style tips, etc.

As far as where to submit articles, there's a wealth of article banks, but you're probably better served by identifying a number of bloggers that offer style tips and are "headband-friendly". Offer to write an article for them about headbands (that's targeting their audience). That will likely give you both SEO and interested prospective website visitors.

Five topics - as with most things I do, look to who is buying them and what they buy them for. Sell that way and marketing suddenly becomes a lot easier.

Topics

(1) Headbands for Aquarius (etc) - personality types. (2) Headbands on a rainy day (3) Running in the park(4) How many headbands do you have?(5) Headbands across the world: Japan(6) Looking after your pet headband, dos and don'ts.(7) Names for a newborn headband.

I'm not too certain about the last two ;-)

There are all sorts of article submission sites - this is not my strength though. I have heard of some and they will do all the footwork for you.

[off topic] Now: as an aside, why do you not advertise for traffic (Adwords, etc)? SEO is fine, only it is very hit and miss. For the amount you spend on a decent copywriter you could get a campaign mounted. With results that are more scalable and predictable. [/off topic]

Note: any of the above pages would do as a landing page for a paid campaign. It pays to be engaging in some way - you could even try the headband taming as an off-the-wall spoof which might just click ...

Jay, I like your idea of finding a blog owner who'd like to post an article. I find most blogs with great readership, etc. usually don't have any guest writers - they do it all themselves. Does it matter if a blog I choose is read an awful lot? Is the idea that blog posts come up higher in search engine results than article submission sites?

Moriarty, very helpful advice to plan and look to who is buying them, what they buy them for and to sell that way. One of your suggestions: Headbands across the world: Japan. I really like this idea, and think maybe a fun article about headbands from different areas of the world would work, and then throw in some info about my japanese prints. In doing this though, the article wouldn't entirely relate to my specific products. Again, does that matter at all, or is there enough SEO benefit for me since it's about "headbands" in general, and contains a link to my own site?

As you probably know, Google's algorithm related to SEO is changing to favor content over backlinks. So, one strategy is to write articles and post them on your own website -- each on its own page, or each as a blog post.

Following is a list of highly-sought terms on Google. To capture the people using these terms, use these exact terms as article titles. A second list shows additional highly-sought terms that may inspire you to expand your product line in the direction potential buyers are searching.

You might invigorate your search results if you start talking about each of these topics on Facebook, as Facebook entries (particularly with followers or commenters) can earn high relevancy scores (i.e., they get good placement in search engine results). With the holidays coming, you surely have lots of ideas about what to say.

Then, as a bank-shot, use Twitter to drive visitors to your Facebook and website pages. It can be really effective in this way. So, a Facebook post might be: "In this image, Cindy Crawford is wearing a leopard headband, nearly identical to the one I created." Then post a link to your version of the headband, or a button that says, "Get one now." The companion Twitter message might be, "Is #CindyCrawford wearing my #headband? You decide." Add a short URL to your Facebook post. This increases your Facebook traffic and thus your rise in search engine results.

Pinterest also seems like a natural place for you to post images of your headbands.

If you still want back-links, think about posting one headband on ebay and then linking that listing to your site, and another on Etsy with a link to your site, etc. These are highly trafficked and relevant sites so a few backlinks from these venues can be helpful.

Generally, all of these activities are getting better results than earlier backlink strategies, now that Google has implemented their Panda/Penguin algorithm modifications.